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«Well, let’s at least try to do that, Robert. We have to start somewhere. A brain is a very complicated thing to study. We will try to find the truth through the subconscious. This is important, especially for you, because you are the one who is seeking it. Right?»
«Alright,» agreed Robert after a while. «We will do it. I fly to Prague tomorrow and I will try to find a psychiatrist. But what do I say to him? How do I explain everything?»
«You don’t need to explain anything to him. Just tell him everything you know about yourself and he will decide what to do. I am sure he will agree to the experiment.»
«How much time do we have?»
«I don’t know. If we stick to your convictions, you are the one in control and we are merely a part of your dream. But seriously speaking, I think we have a day, two at the most. I will try to schedule another appointment with Trevor for tomorrow.»
Amanda ended the conversation and woke Trevor.
The voice recorder stopped.
Trevor and Amanda sat opposite each other and were silent.
Finally, Amanda spoke. This time, her voice was not as steady as at the start of the session.
«Trevor, psychology can ultimately explain a lot. It seems to me that we’ve got a lot of work to do. It is complicated because this is a unique case in my practice. I have never seen anything like it.»
Trevor looked at Amanda, but couldn’t say a word. He could not understand what had just happened. It did not fit into the limits of ordinary concepts and his perception of things.
«That was me?» He finally forced himself to speak.
«It is totally possible that was you. Or one of your personalities.»
«How is this possible?» asked Trevor. He was in a state of shock.
«The human brain is a mystery even for us psychologists. I only wanted to take you back to yesterday, two days ago and then dig a bit into your past. But you heard it all.»
«Amanda, is this really possible? Is this a disease?»
«What is possible? Multiple personalities? It is possible. There is a scientific term for it too – dissociative identity disorder. I wouldn’t call it a disease, though. It’s something else…»
«What happens to me now?»
«Nothing, I think… I hope… If you’ve lived with this up until now, without suspecting anything, it is possible that everything will go back to the way it was before today.»
Amanda then tried to explain to Trevor that some psychologists, and also individuals who identify themselves as having a split personality, believe that this condition is not a disorder, but rather a natural variation of human consciousness that has nothing to do with dissociation. She herself could not understand what she was dealing with, and so what she was saying was as much for herself as for Trevor.
Trevor, however, was uncertain. He thought Amanda was just trying to calm him down.
«You see, Trevor, many psychiatrists do not agree with the definition of multiple personality syndrome as a definitive disorder, but consider multiple personalities as mental disorder, that is, not a disease. Here, for example…» She looked around, went to a bookshelf, and came back with a big medical encyclopedia.
«Here.» She flipped through several pages, found what she was looking for, and read: «Anthropologists Suryani and Gordon Jensen are convinced that the phenomenon of vivid trance in the community of Bali has the same phenomenological nature as the multiple personality phenomenon in the West. It is claimed that the people in shamanic cultures who experience multiple personalities do not define these personalities as a part of themselves, but as independent souls or spirits. There is no evidence of a link between multiple personalities, disassociation and the recovery of memories or sexual abuse in these cultures. In traditional cultures, multiple personalities shown, for example, by shamans or African sorcerers, are not considered a disorder or a disease.»
«I don’t know anything about that, Amanda. I don’t understand a thing,» Trevor said dejectedly. He looked at Amanda and asked hopefully: «This is not a joke?»
«At first, I thought so too… And to say that I am very confused about what happened is to say nothing. Let’s see tomorrow, if you don’t mind. We will prepare for the conversation more thoroughly tomorrow and try to understand what your subconscious has in store for us.»
«So, that’s it for today?» he asked, confused.
«Yes. I say we meet tomorrow at the same time and have another session. I recommend you rest today. Set aside all your business and thoughts. Just relax emotionally and psychologically. Go to a night club. That might work. Try not to think about what happened. Okay?»
«Relaxing is all I’ve been doing lately,» Trevor grumbled.
***
Robert opened his eyes. He woke up as suddenly as he had fallen asleep. It seemed as though the bed simply spit him out from somewhere inside the thick mattress. He was still very confused, as if he had been startled awake from a nightmare, and tried to concentrate. His heart was racing and his brain felt as though it was about to explode.
Robert was not simply confused; he was surprised, shocked, stunned, because he just went from being a passive bystander to an active participant in his dream. That was something he had not expected.
It was clear that Amanda could hear him and answer his questions. This was the first time in Robert’s life that he had had direct conscious contact and even a dialog with the world of his dream. Robert had often thought about this, but when it finally happened, he was not ready and did not know where to start. He decided that it was his only chance to find the truth and wanted to remain in that state for as long as he could.
He needed answers, but for that he had to convince Amanda that his existence here, in this world, separately from Trevor, was real. She had asked him to speak about himself, and Robert excitedly shared the story of his life on this side of the dream with her.
But then everything disappeared just as fast as it had appeared, leaving Robert alone with his thoughts and doubts.
What had happened to him further complicated Robert’s already difficult situation, plunging him greater into uncertainty and hardly helping him to find the thread that could lead him to unravel his psychological state.
Robert slowly got up, took out a red-bound diary from his suitcase, sat down at the table and began writing in detail everything that happened to him in the dream. As he was finishing, he wrote «PSYCHIATRIST. URGENTLY!!!» in big letters at the bottom of the page and underlined the words three times.
Just three hours remained before his flight and Robert hurriedly left the hotel room. He decided he would find a psychiatrist as soon as he returned to Prague to conduct the experiment proposed by Amanda. This had to be done as soon as possible.
Chapter 9
Geneva, Switzerland
16 December 2011. 11:25
Trevor, conflicted with emotion, left Amanda’s office and headed towards his hotel, thinking about what just happened. He was deeply confused about what the psychologist had told him.
There was another person living inside him!
I have a split personality, he thought. I’m demented. I guess I’m demented! I am a mentally ill person and I will probably have to get some sort of treatment.
Trevor tried to think about what he knew about mental illnesses. Shots of some black and white films came to mind: insane people in straitjackets with wide straps buckled behind their backs, bloodshot eyes, crazy looks, desperate screams, wild laughter, convulsions, and shock therapy.
Trevor’s knowledge in this field was extremely poor, but it was enough to provoke panic. He trembled as he walked along the street.
Amanda watched him from behind a slightly opened curtain with concern. The phone started ringing. She picked up and after a brief pause answered: «Yes, I found out, but it’s not so simple… Something’s changed, and I will need a little more time. I’d like to reschedule everything for tomorrow.» She listened to a man’s voice and quietly replied, «Yes, this is very important… to me.»
Trevor crossed the street and, having forgotten about his meeting with Jovan, continued to walk uncertainly along the paved road.
Amanda’s words were throbbing in his head: «Shamans, African sorcerers.»
He recalled driving with a BBC crew and Etienne on a bumpy dirt road in the jungles of Sierra Leone at the end of the 1990s.
***
In a village, sixty miles northeast of Freetown, where they stopped for the night, the reporters stumbled upon some festival of the local Yoruba[22 - Yoruba (Ọmọ Yorùbá) is an ethnic group that inhabits West Africa (from the mouth of the Niger River to the Gulf of Guinea): Nigeria, Togo, Benin, Ghana. There is also a small diaspora in Canada. The Yoruba constitute nearly 40 million people.] people.
The locals treated the foreigners with cameras surprisingly peacefully, allowed them to spend the night and even invited them to participate in the festivities under the condition that all cameras remained in the car.
In the evening, the whole village gathered near the round reed hut of the chief.
Trevor was treated to some local drink made of the fruits of a marula[23 - Marula (Sclerocarya birrea) is a deciduous tree of the sumac family. The tree has a wide crown and grey mottled bark and grows up to 18 m. It is indigenous to the woodlands of South and West Africa.] that had a very unpleasant sour taste and affected the brain like a «blow from a mule’s hoof», as the locals joked. Sometime later, when Trevor began to recover, he realized that he almost could not feel his body and only his brain was clearly showing «signs of life». In addition, as it turned out later, the drink accelerated perception of his surroundings.
Everyone was dancing to the beat of a sad song and rhythm of special, ritual drums carved from a tree trunk called a Bata. Later, the intensity of the drums increased so much that the movements of the dancers resembled convulsions. The volume of the chanting would sometimes muffle even the sounds of the Bata.
One of the men set fire to a wide ring on the ground, evoking ominous shadows and reflections. The drums died down and everybody stopped to watch the circle of fire.
An enchanter with a long staff, to which a dozen small white monkey skulls were attached, knocking loudly against each other in time with his movements, entered the circle through a narrow passage.
The drums resumed their beat and the men and women began to dance synchronously.
Not feeling his body, Trevor moved to the rhythm of the drums together with the rest.
The enchanter was dressed in bright sheet that loosely fit his body.
As thin as a skeleton, he bent over and began to spin inside the circle of fire. His face grew calm in the flashes of fire but it soon transformed into menacing grimaces. He gritted his thin, uneven, yellow teeth and shouted something in an unfamiliar language.
Then suddenly he fell silent, stood up and raised his hand to the sky. Several small grey bones flew from his palm before scattering around him inside the circle of fire. The enchanter leaned forward and looked intently at the bones. Then he straightened up, stretched out his arms and began to whisper some spells while staring at the sky. His eyes, covered by a white fog, looked unnerving.
The drumming grew faster, louder.
The sorcerer, with his arms still spread wide, began to rise.
When he reached a meter and a half above the ground, he dropped his staff.
The dancing became more frenetic, and the volume of the singing increased, reaching its climax. Robert was reminded of a Witches’ Sabbath.
The enchanter slowly began to descend, nodding his head sharply and staring with his blind eyes into the crowd around him, as if searching for prey. When his bare feet touched the ground, the sounds were dispersed by an abrupt silence.
The old sorcerer kept his blind eyes on Trevor. He moved his arms forward and slowly approached through the circle of fire. Trevor stood frozen, deprived of any control over his own body. The enchanter touched his forehead with his palm. At that moment, the enchanter’s body bent back unnaturally and began to shake, his hand still glued to Trevor’s forehead. His cloudy eyes were directed somewhere in the distance, where a full, inverted moon shone as a pale witness to the Devil’s Sabbath.
The convulsions stopped and the hand on Trevor’s forehead became incredibly hot. He tried to pull back, but his body remained beyond his control.
Suddenly a terrifying picture appeared before Trevor’s eyes: an overturned railway car with the torn bodies of dozens of people. Charred human remains lay mixed up with broken seats, twisted handrails, scorched pieces of metal, and other ruined detritus. Fire began to roll down the car like a growing ball, as if in slow motion. It was unnerving and extremely realistic. Trevor even felt the furious flame that was about to engulf him on his face and the unbearable smell of burnt flesh all around.
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